Following on the post immediately below, “Data-Driven Governance” Will Not Solve The World’s Problems.
From The New Atlantis, Spring 2021 issue:
Building a politics of connection where fanatical certainty fails
Hopelessly polarized though our era in global politics seems, we may be grateful that it pales in comparison with the first half of the twentieth century. What had begun as a rhetorical battle between competing political ideals ended with total war. The tendency for grand political narratives to fanaticize and foster totalitarianism inspired The Open Society and Its Enemies, a famous 1945 book by the Austrian-British philosopher Karl Popper. The book’s message for us today is that the threat to democratic, “open” societies is not misinformation or ignorance but rather fanatical certainty.
Popper’s political ideas were informed by his philosophy of science. He emphasized the tentativeness of scientific knowledge, contending that we never know whether theories are true in an ultimate sense, but only whether they have survived previous attempts to disprove them. Scientific “objectivity” emerges not from the unique cognitive qualities or neutrality of researchers but from their critical engagement with each other’s work. Progress in knowledge relies on an environment that fosters lively criticism, a system that encourages productive dissent. The enemies of this system are those who insist on perfect certainty.
Though the political harms of misplaced certainty are now much discussed, we only hear about one side of the equation. The trouble always seems to be with “conspiracy theorists” who fail to face up to reality, to scientific fact. But the relationship of “debunkers” to certainty is not all that different. Who hasn’t given in to the urge to reflexively drop a Snopes link, or to reference a scientific article whose abstract we only skimmed, in order to avoid thinking carefully about why a great-aunt or former college acquaintance doesn’t trust Anthony Fauci?
The belief that misinformation is today’s main threat to democracy blinds us to the pernicious effects of a broader preoccupation with certitude. This obsession has been tearing at American politics throughout the Covid pandemic, and continues to imperil debates over vaccination, masking, and lockdowns. But the problem will remain with us long after the virus has been beaten.
The open society
The harms of fascist and communist ideologies, according to Karl Popper, stemmed from their historicism. Ideological zealots claimed to have scientifically deduced the course of human history and the proper ends of human society — whether it be the empowerment of the right national population or the creation of a classless society. Their prophetic view of history’s end in turn justified whatever means were necessary to make it come about.Popper reasoned that the attractiveness of historicisms stemmed from the discomforts of living in “open societies.” Where the stability of society and its proper ends were once assured by royal lineage or divine decree, now democratic politics requires people to reckon with the profoundly unsettling demand of individual participation in government, and of change that requires a laborious process of trial-and-error learning. Progress had become the product of ongoing, piecemeal tinkering with social institutions. Democracy was itself akin to a scientific organization, intent on subjecting policies to real-life testing rather than deducing them from ideal, utopian visions.
This epistemological defense of democracy — the idea that democracy comprises a set of strategies to help societies cope with uncertainty — is too often forgotten. But it has an established history in political thought: Charles Lindblom’s Intelligence of Democracy (1965) and Hélène Landemore’s Democratic Reason (2012) describe democracy as a form of distributed thinking. Like Popper’s philosophy of science, this vision of democracy emphasizes the tentativeness of political truths and the inherent cognitive limitations of any given citizen, even an expert. If political outcomes ever approximate what seems “objectively” most desirable, it is through a healthy process of negotiation in which “subjective” individuals challenge each other, rather than through assent to the superior understanding of an expert class.
But The Open Society was a product of its time. Because Popper did not anticipate threats to open societies outside of grand historical narratives, he did not imagine that the source of fanatical certitude would one day be individuals, who would fashion it out of a veritable flood of discordant facts and suspicions. Americans have increasingly come to see themselves as capable of sifting through all the available evidence to discover unerring truths that their political opponents are too biased, ignorant, or corrupt to see. Although some citizens still coalesce around shared visions of the ultimate makeup of society (such as that of white nationalists), the more significant drivers of polarized, intransigent politics are the twin afflictions of scientism and conspiracism.
Obsessed with Certitude
In The Democratic Surround (2013), Stanford communication professor Fred Turner details how during World War II a new form of propaganda was pioneered in the United States, one meant to stem the rising tide of fascism. Members of President Roosevelt’s Committee for National Morale worried that traditional mass-media-based propaganda risked cultivating an authoritarian personality wholly unsuitable to the American way of life. Their influence led to the creation of a style of government communication believed to be more compatible with a democratic personality.For example, in 1942, a few months after Pearl Harbor, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, working with the Navy and federal New Deal agencies, offered the exhibition “Road to Victory,” allowing visitors to circulate among an immersive array of patriotic photographs, texts, and murals. The installation was intended, in the words of the organizers, to “enable every American to see himself as a vital and indispensable element of victory” — and to provide a counterweight to the “unreasoning fealty” that might come from listening to a demagogue on the radio, Turner explains. Even though the overall message was carefully curated, the feeling that one chose one’s own path through the exhibit aimed to reinforce an experience of individualism.
The Internet facilitates an experience with a similar propagandistic effect — conveying the experience of selecting your own path of discovery rather than passively receiving information. Even though messages and searches might be curated by Silicon Valley algorithms or packaged in ways meant to inflame or deceive, the experience nevertheless feels unencumbered. A person does his or her “own research” on contentious topics, choosing where to look and whom to listen to. Social media further seduces with its promise of intellectual freedom, encouraging the idea that, as rational individuals searching for truth, we can go out on our own and grasp with certainty the reality that eludes our fellow citizens.
The reigning paradigm of chasing certitude is scientism, which embraces what policy scholars Edward Woodhouse and Dean Nieusma call the “simple theory of expertise.” This theory imagines a neat division of labor between scientists, government officials, businesspeople, and average citizens. Because both the public and government officials are largely ignorant about technical matters, they must delegate responsibility to scientific experts. Expert advice is treated as value-free even when it is clearly not, such as when many health experts excused lax social distancing for Black Lives Matter protests but then chided Americans for visiting relatives over Thanksgiving.
Scientism goes a step further than this simple theory by denying non-experts any role at all in answering tenacious policy questions. Experts no longer merely advise the policy process but are now in the driver’s seat. This in turn lets government officials abdicate responsibility for their decisions. The past year is ripe with examples. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer said last April that her state’s pandemic plans would be a “data-driven approach based on facts, based on science, based on recommendations from experts and epidemiologists and economists.” The governors of California, Oregon, and Washington claimed that their reopening decisions would be guided by “heath outcomes and science — not politics.” Journalists and social media influencers echoed this scientism with pleas for citizens to just “listen to the science,” as if the tradeoffs in deciding which businesses and institutions to close or keep open and what practices should be acceptable weren’t spectacularly thorny. Scientism lets us convince ourselves that “the facts” do not compose an imperfect map of an incredibly complex reality but instead constitute the territory itself.
Yet in mainstream media, worries about conspiracism loom far larger. Ever since “post-truth” entered our vocabulary, we have been gripped by panic about misinformation and disinformation. But conspiracism is more than just conspiracy theorizing — which gets a bad rap, as if it is never justifiable to suspect subterfuge. Regardless of the provenance of the UFOs in the Navy’s recently released footage, for example, the claims that the military has been secretly researching these phenomena ended up being true. And of course conspiracies do happen. People who suspect that drug manufacturers, distributers, and doctors may be in cahoots have seen their suspicion confirmed by stunning revelations about Purdue Pharma and others during the opioid crisis.
Conspiracism goes further than conspiracy theorizing. It reduces all political issues to the machinations of powerful elites, adopting what Woodhouse and Nieusma called the “cynical theory of expertise” in which “expertise serves only the affluent and the powerful.” The Plandemic documentary, for instance, claimed that Covid-19 was manufactured in a laboratory and that the pandemic is a plot devised by the media and high-level officials such as Anthony Fauci to prop up the vaccine industry. The documentary is conspiracism rather than just a conspiracy theory because it has a totalizing view of the health care establishment as rotten to its core, portraying only outsider experts such as Judy Mikovits as willing to tell the truth....
....MUCH MORE
Related:
October 2015
Harvard Business Review: "The End of Expertise"
There will always be a very-highly-paid place for people who can combine disparate datastreams into coherent depictions of reality.
And for charlatans, knaves and varlets....
October 2015
"Feeling Like You're an Expert Can Make You Closed-minded"
Nuh-uh....
May 2021
"The Incoherence of the Economists"
October 2021
Death of the Expert Class: "Senior Fed Economist Slams Economics As 'Arrant Nonsense'"
The expert class, because they are small in proportion to the total population (despite millions of people wanting to get in on the expert class action), only have a few ways to achieve their goals and justify their salaries.
When dealing with the masses they can use persuasion, they can use trickery, they can use coercion, they can use force or they can use a variation on what is known in sales as the assumptive close, just go ahead and do what you were going to do and bring in the other methods if you get pushback.
Unfortunately, over the last five or ten years the expert classes have squandered most of the goodwill the populace might have had toward them....
